Posts Tagged ‘politics’

[Editor’s note: I picked up this fascinating read while in San Francisco earlier this month and devoured the artwork and critical essays by Gayle Clemans on the flight back to DC. Features pieces by Maya Lin and Paula Scher previously mentioned here. Thanks Jag!]

What tattoo art has to do with fashion, vintage atlases and Nazi concentration camps.

We’ve always been fascinated by maps — through various elements of design, from typography to color theory to data visualization, they brilliantly condense and capture complex notions about space, scale, topography, politics and more. But where things get most interesting is that elusive intersection of the traditional and the experimental, where artists explore the map medium as a conceptual tool of abstract representation. And that’s exactly what The Map of the Art, a fantastic Morning News piece by Katharine Harmon, examines.

Corriette Schoenaerts, ‘Europe,’ 2005

Schoenaerts, a conceptual photographer living in Amsterdam, constructs countries and continents out of clothing.

Qin Ga, ‘Site 22: Mao Zedong Temple,’ 2005

In 2002, China’s Long March Project embarked upon a ‘Walking Visual Display’ along the route of the 1934-1936 historic 6000-mile Long March, and Beijing-based artist Qin kept tracked the group’s route in a tattooed map on his back. Three years later, Qin continued the trek where the original marchers had left off, accompanied by a camera crew and a tattoo artist, who continually updated the map on Qin’s back.

[Editor's note: I could not put down this fascinating book about post-WWII politics, religion, and culture in the United States of America. The lead author is a journalist by training and skillfully pulls together many threads into a coherent overview with first hand stories, maps, and graphics illustrating his points. If you are a geographer, sociologist, or political scientist make sure to check out his work.]

Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart

By Bill Bishop with Robert G. Cushing

This is the untold story of why America is so culturally and politically divided.

America may be more diverse than ever coast to coast, but the places where we live are becoming increasingly crowded with people who live, think, and vote like we do. This social transformation didn’t happen by accident. We’ve built a country where we can all choose the neighborhood and church and news show — most compatible with our lifestyle and beliefs. And we are living with the consequences of this way-of-life segregation. Our country has become so polarized, so ideologically inbred, that people don’t know and can’t understand those who live just a few miles away. The reason for this situation, and the dire implications for our country, is the subject of this ground-breaking work.

In 2004, journalist Bill Bishop made national news in a series of articles when he first described “the big sort.” Armed with original and startling demographic data, he showed how Americans have been sorting themselves over the past three decades into homogeneous communities — not at the regional level, or the red-state/blue-state level, but at the micro level of city and neighborhood. In The Big Sort Bishop deepens his analysis in a brilliantly reported book that makes its case from the ground up, starting with stories about how we live today, and then drawing on history, economics, and our changing political landscape to create one of the most compelling big-picture accounts of America in recent memory.

The Big Sort will draw comparisons to Robert Putam’s Bowling Alone and Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class and will redefine the way Americans think about themselves for decades to come.

[Editor's note: At first I thought this was pure humor but, for whatever reason, Google Maps does indeed now show detailed resolution at the Naval Observatory in Washington, DC, aka Cheney's secret hideout #1.]

Google Maps’ satellite imagery has shown us clear shots of the White House, the Capitol and even the Pentagon. But one thing it never displayed properly was Dick Cheney’s house. Until now.

The Vice President’s quarters, located at the Naval Observatory since 1974, have been pixelated ever since Google has given the public an easy way to check them out—coincidentally ever since Dick Cheney has lived there. This censorship wasn’t by Google but those supplying Google the source images, the U.S. Geological Survey.

Now on the same week of Biden’s arrival, we’re suddenly allowed to see the VP’s house as clearly as the President’s. Who knows the exact reason for Cheney’s extra security…maybe he’d been nervous about the public catching wind of his Mini Cheney clone farm, or maybe he’s just prone to gardening in his shorts despite being self-conscious about his varicose veins. [Valleywag]

[Editor's note: This interactive which I co-created for the Washington Post keeps tack of president elect Obama's major cabinet appointees with a fun, game-like interface. See who's in the running for each position, Obama's rumored pick, and read bios for officially announced nominees. Many thanks to Aly!]

[Editor’s note: Below is the interactive I just published in the Washington Post examining the sponsors of this week’s Democratic and next week’s Republican conventions. Does money influence politics? Use this tool to explore further. Features thematic map with proportional circles showing number of contributions and dollar value of contributions by state and a data table listing of those companies and if they tend to give more to Democrats or Republicans. Reads data in from XML file and programatically draws the proportional circles. Republished from the Washington Post.]

Corporations, unions and wealthy donors are allowed to pour unlimited cash into the host committees that finance presidential conventions in exchange for goodies such as private receptions with legislators and VIP access to special events. Most of the corporate sponsors revealed so far for Denver and St. Paul (the host committees do not have to disclose donors or how much they raise until 60 days after the convention) are veterans of Washington’s money-for-influence game.

Use the interactive below to see how they have contributed more than $180 million to federal campaigns since 2005.

[Editor's note: The Washington Post rolled out a new contest this week in preparation for the Democrat and Republican conventions and the big event come November 3rd. It uses a Flash based map of the 50 states to let the user choose which candidate McCain, Obama, or Other/undecided the state will vote for and how the votes will tally in the, as I interject, outmoded electoral college. Once set, the user can submit the map and prizes will be allocated after the election.]

Create your political map and predict the electoral outcome! Think you know politics? Here’s your chance to prove it. Pick which candidate will get to 270 electoral votes and you could win the most competitive contest outside the presidential race. Full Contest Rules and Prizes.

The fallout from Russia’s excursion into Georgia continues to be mapped by the news media (view graphic). Today the New York Times features a map looking at post-Solviet power structures in eastern Europe and Central Asia where democratic and not-so-democratic regimes still feel Moscow’s shadow while being tugged at by the West.

Writing in The Financial Times last week, Chrystia Freeland recalled Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay “The End of History?,” which trumpeted the definitive triumph of liberal democracy. The great nightmare tyrannies of last century — the Evil Empire, Red China — had been left behind by those inseparable twins, freedom and prosperity. Civilization had chosen, and it chose us.

So much for that thesis. Surveying the Russian military rout of neighboring Georgia and the spectacle of China’s Olympics, Ms. Freeland, editor of The Financial Times’s American edition and a journalist who started her career covering Russia and Ukraine, proclaimed that a new Age of Authoritarianism was upon us.

If it is not yet an age, it is at least a season: Springtime for autocrats, and not just the minor-league monsters of Zimbabwe and the like, but the giant regimes that seemed so surely bound for the ash heap in 1989.

The Chinese have made their Olympics an exultant display of athletic prowess and global prestige without having to temper their impulse to suppress and control. From the dazzling locksteps of that opening ceremony, to the kowtowing international V.I.P.’s, to the carefully policed absence of protest, this was an Olympics largely free of democratic mess.

Individualism has been confined between lane markers. The pre-Olympics promises that attention would be paid to international norms of behavior went unredeemed. The New York Times’s Andrew Jacobs followed one citizen who decided to take up the government’s Olympic offer of designated protest zones for aggrieved parties who had filed the proper paperwork. Zhang Wei applied for the requisite license and was promptly arrested for “disturbing social order.” Take that, International Olympic Committee.

The striking thing about Russia’s subjugation of uppity Georgia was not the ease or audacity but the swagger of it. This was not just about a couple of obscure border enclaves, nor even, really, about Georgia. This was existential payback.

It turns out that if 1989 was an end — the end of the Wall, the beginning of the end of the Soviet empire, if not in fact the end of history — it was also a beginning.

I’m on a topology kick so today’s “map” shows the links between 533 different websites and blogs focused on the 2008 presidential race (view site here). Produced by Linkfluence, this social graph theory based tool has both “map” and “trend” views. Each site is a node or “place” in the topology and anytime the sites reference each other or a candidate thru time a line or “edge” is drawn between the nodes. I find it ironic that the “liberal” media is actually quite centrist when compared to the liberal and conservative sides of the topology.

Where is the debate happening ? What are the hot topics on the agenda ? Who’s making the news ? Who are the online community leaders ? Here are very simple and comprehensive ways you can answer these questions. … Identify the true opinion hubs and shapers in the debate. (Presidential Watch 08).